To address the elephant in the room right out of the gate, yes, it likely never would have been possible for any filmmaker/documentarian to cover the entire history and impact of easily the most popular and widely visited video-sharing platform in the history of the internet in only one movie. Inherently, the scope of such a movie would need to span the length of at least one – maybe two – of those pulled-from-the-headlines miniseries that have been gripping the nation these past few years. With The YouTube Effect, though, director Alex Winter pulls off quite a feat by offering us a detailed but succinct overview of how YouTube came to be, what it eventually became, and what the possibility of its future looks like – all in only 99 minutes. It’s a bit of a jumble of information and perspectives, but it’s also never less than entertaining.
It also helps that Winter has nailed the concept of using one’s access to cast a wide net. Not only do we hear the brief details of the site’s beginnings – as the brainchild of former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim (the latter also the star of the platform’s very first video) in 2005 and its eventual sale to Google for more than a billion dollars in 2006 – but the movie divides its attention between four crucial periods of time in which the site has had a considerable impact. If one wants to find four Mount Rushmore-type interview subjects, Winter also pulls that off perfectly.
Who can better understand the early days of YouTube as a platform on which to make money and find success, after all, than Anthony Padilla? The co-founder of Smosh, that legendary sketch and variety program which became one of the first ten channels to be monetized, owes his entire livelihood to the platform. His story also serves as something of a cautionary tale, though, about the idea of giving up one’s voice to a corporation, as happened to the channel in 2011. A far more positive story might be that shared by Caleb Cain, whose spiral down the alt-right rabbit hole ended in the realization that he had been duped by the white supremacist rhetoric and dead-end conspiracy theories of Stefan Molyneux, QAnon and similar groups whose salvation had been a format that could keep someone in thrall of their face and voice.
The structure of the documentary is more or less a straightforward timeline, beginning with the fun side of YouTube’s content-heavy early days and continuing on with its eventual relationship between content creators and consumers, as well as between content promotion and the discernment of its users to know what they’ve gotten themselves into. Natalie Wynn understands the better side of that, thankfully, as her ContraPoints channel and perspective as a trans woman with a following have proven over the years. Brianna Wu has had exposure to the darker side, given how the Gamergate scandal of 2014 and 2015 led to death threats.
Their perspectives are all essential to understanding the lasting impact a video-sharing platform like YouTube can have once a user becomes trapped in a bubble not entirely of their own making. That algorithm exists, after all, and isn’t going anywhere any time soon. The YouTube Effect inevitably ties all of this into the COVID-19 pandemic, the attempted coup of the government in 2021, and the current swing toward fascism on the newly empowered political right. It earns that shift, even as (on the face of it) this is a fairly standard but engrossing documentary about how it all began.
Photo courtesy of Drafthouse Films
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